


There are many names in history, but none of them ours

by xhiro



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 01, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 14:04:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11761455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xhiro/pseuds/xhiro
Summary: It's hard to sleep with the feeling of blood on your hands.And Shiro has to be cursed to have had not one, but two Holts in his life.At least she seems to have just as much trouble sleeping.





	There are many names in history, but none of them ours

**Author's Note:**

> Set sometime past season 1 episode 5 I guess?? I wrote this during season 2 and before a lot of info was out but I thought I would finish it so here we are

It comes to Shiro in pieces and flashes.

Things that he's not sure of, a fist swinging forward, a blur of steel and violence, the feeling that he's too late.

Usually he's able to ignore it, put these sensations out of his mind, but sometimes, a phantom fist will slam into his chest in the middle of battle and he's blinking reality out of his eyes.

And he's a second too slow. Too slow to catch the blow coming straight for the back of his head, too slow to dodge out of the way, too slow to catch Lance mouthing something to him before the world blurs out at the edges. Darkness takes him.

 

* * *

 

Shiro wakes with a shudder.

Something hums in the background. There are several lights glowing around him, some flashing strange messages at him, and for a second he's taken back to another time, to another shiver down his spine, before he blinks hard and the scenery focuses into reality.

He's in one of the pods in the medical bay. It's hard to make out anything in the room save for the faint green glow of the pod he's occupying. He pauses. He can taste iron in the back of his mouth.

After what feels like a century, Shiro sits up. The cricks and knots in his back disagree with the action as does the wave of nausea that hits him. He slams his palms against his face and tries to take deep breaths, tries to calm his racing heart.

It could be nothing. It's probably nothing. But the image of blood running down a freckled cheek and a hand reaching out to him for salvation are burned into his memory like a brand.

“You're finally awake.”

Shiro squints out into the darkness. A small figure hunches over an apparatus giving off dim light. She stretches upwards, the large sleeves of her ill-fitting outfit fall back in wrinkled layers. Pidge looks back at him, her oversized glasses casting half her face in shadow.

“M... “ He tries to answer, and has to stop himself from calling her by another name. Same glasses, different face.

Pidge's mouth turns upwards, and she reaches behind her for something. “If you slept any longer, I thought we'd have to get you a cane by the time you woke up.” Trying to keep the air light, she jokes. It would be a lot easier if Shiro could lapse into their usual routine. He grips the edge of the pod tightly.

“I didn't sleep well,” He answers.

“Why's that?” She fiddles absentmindedly with the device. After a moment, it beeps and she frowns.

A blood-soaked space suit flashes violently into his mind and he physically tries to wipe the phantom stain from his hand. He blinks and counts to ten slowly.

“Indigestion?” Shiro tries, but sure enough, sharp as a cat, Pidge looks up at him with narrowed eyes. The apparatus beeps skeptically.

There's a pause where Pidge casts a searching gaze around her, at the various gadgets and tools she seems to have surrounded herself with. From a distance she looks just like another one of her toys, small and precise, fragile enough to be broken with a misplaced touch.

She settles on a small round object. With a complicated series of twists and turns, the ball beeps and she tosses it into the air where it jumps for a second, and then rights itself in the middle of the room. It flickers on and casts a warm dim light. Enough for Shiro to make out the dark circles under Pidge's eyes and he realizes for the first time why he hasn't seen her around for breakfast the past few days.

“You look like shit.”

A quick glance at Shiro's reflection in the pod door reveals that oh, he does look like shit. He rubs hard at his dark circles, willing them away.

The look on Pidge's face seems to suggest it didn't work.

“How long have I been out?”

Pidge fiddles with a thin screwdriver in her hand. “...this has been going on for longer than a few days, hasn't it?” It's a statement, not a question.

Shiro drums his fingers along the side of the pod. “...yeah, it has.” An audible sigh, and she goes back to tapping at the screen in front of her.

“You know, I'm not good at the whole, pep talk thing,” Pidge airquotes with one hand, “That's probably more of a Coran, or a Hunk thing-but like... if you need to talk. I'm here?” And then, after a second, a small fist pump. “I support you.”

She makes an inscrutable expression and then begins attacking the device with the screwdriver.

Shiro blinks. “....Thanks, I guess.” There is no response from the other side of the room. Typical.

He's beginning to feel a little pathetic beating himself up in the dark, so he crawls out of the pod and wanders over to see what Pidge is doing. He stifles a yawn as he looks down at her screen. “What mad scientist schemes are we up to tonight?” It looks like a series of code, but that's about all Shiro understands.

It takes a minute, but eventually Pidge explains, eyes still on the screen. “So, I've been noticing lately while running biometrics and infared scans over the castle that Alteans and humans give off different energy signatures-that leads me to believe that different alien species have unique signatures, obviously,” a one-armed shrug suggests Shiro should nod so he does. “The castle's current biometric scanner can't determine what we're dealing with when checking for life on foreign vessels, so if I were able to build some sort of index and incorporate it into the castle's system, well.”

“It would make it easier to pick up signs of human life,” Shiro guesses.

Pidge finally looks up, mouth frozen on her last syllable. Her mouth tries making a few different shapes soundlessly. It settles into a frown and she shakes her head, returning to tapping arcanely. “...there are still a lot of variables I have to make up for, like accounting for distortions of readings depending on inclement weather, the temperature of nearby objects and surroundings-all that sort of stuff. It's, you know, still in the early stages.” She tries to wave it off, but her sideway glances at Shiro hide nothing.

As the thought settles in the pit of Shiro's stomach, it eats away at him. The voice taunts in the back of his head.

_It should have been him._

“Shiro?” This time when Pidge shifts her gaze to him, it stays there.

She looks so much like him that Shiro keeps seeing an arena and armed guards around them. “He's out there somewhere.” He tries to explain, suddenly finding his mouth dry.

Pidge's eyes soften at that. “I know he is. It's just hard sometimes.”

“...Yeah.” She wouldn't be here if he had just done his job.

He grips his arm tightly, the flesh throbbing with pain. It's metal. It's just an attachment, he shouldn't feel anything, but it burns.

“Shiro, what's wrong?”

He can taste iron in his mouth again. What did he do for the Galra? Why can't he remember? He tries to make his stupid brain work.

“Shiro, stop.”

If he could just make it work. If he could just remember. He grips it tighter.

“ _Stop._ ” The voice cuts through the noise in his head.

When Shiro blinks he's seated across the floor from Pidge, his arms tight in her grip. He tries to school his breathing, suddenly finding himself out of breath-but it's strangely difficult. Pidge notices.

“Look at me. Breathe with me. One, two, three.” She takes deep slow breaths and Shiro tries to mime her.

“You're doing great.”

He breathes out through his nose, letting his chest rise slowly, and eventually feels his heartbeat even out.

He checks to see if the feeling of something trying to escape from his body is gone, and then whispers, “...sorry.” The sinking feeling in his stomach, however, remains.

Pidge watches him through her glasses for a moment longer. A vague expression is on her face, eyes half-lidded, brows furrowed-it's the look he's seen on her face countless times when she's trying to figure something out, dissect a new alien machine, decipher what makes it tick. He's just never found himself on the other end of it before. Finally, she releases him and sits back. “Are you okay now?”

Shiro doesn't trust himself to answer when he's still blinking half-memories out of his vision. He tries and what comes out of his mouth is,

“What if I did it?”

There's a deafening silence after and it's too late to take it back.

When Shiro dares to look across the room, Pidge looks a million miles away. He almost wishes the scrutinizing look was back.

“What?” It's probably just the empty room, but she sounds like the end of a tunnel.

Shiro feels like he's swallowing rocks when he goes on, but he has to, “We're not even sure-what if I actually did... something to him?” The other side of the room is painfully still.

“I can barely remember what happened before, we're only going off the scattered memories I have.”

“...Shut up.”

“I have Galra-tech attached to my body. What if it's not under my control? The point is, I don't know-”

“ _Shut up._ ”

There's something sharp against Shiro's throat. He can feel it against his vein, feel his heart beat under it. He must be getting old because he didn't see Pidge go for her bayard before she was pressing it tightly against his neck, a dangerous look in her eyes.

He tries not to move, but he can accutely feel every twitch in his body. A bead of sweat drips down his neck slowly and he can feel it travel down his skin.

He knows Pidge. Knows her strengths and weaknesses, knows the topography of her mind, knows she would never hurt him. But he doesn't know the look in her eyes right now-an edge of something foreign, her shoulders held tightly together, like she might spring at any moment. He closes his eyes.

And then it's gone. The pressure against his throat disappears.

“If I thought for even one second that you killed my brother...” Pidge's voice is carefully even, painfully even, and restrained. “...we wouldn't be having this conversation.” There's a long pause. It feels like years later when she finally speaks again.

“But you wouldn't.”

Shiro breathes in sharply.

“...I heard everything about you from him, I looked forward to stories about you. You're... you're a good person.”

He finally opens his eyes when he feels something warm pressed against him and looks down to see a head full of brown hair and arms wrapped around him.

This time he's not the one carefully measuring out his breathing. He almost reaches a hand out to comfort her before he stops himself.

“How can you trust me?” There are so many questions he wants answered, so many things he's unsure about-but this is the only one that matters.

The machines continue thrumming quietly, Pidge's device beeps impatiently for her attention, and the orb in the centre of the room glows.

“Because you trust me,” Pidge says after a while. “I lied to you guys about who I was, where I'm from, tried to use the green lion for my own purpose-but I'm still here. Because... because you trusted me.”

A weight lifts from Shiro's shoulders.

“I can't lose you too.” A muffled voice says from below him. It hits him like a punch to the gut.

“Is it... as simple as that?” Shiro tries when he finds his voice again. It can't be this easy. Not after all those nights of waking up in a cold sweat, trying so hard to forget. Those nights of trying to run away. But Pidge is still there.

“Simple as that.”

He can't see it, but he can feel a smile against his shirt. It's a bit wet too, so he finally allows himself to fold his arms around her and pretend to be an adult. It's more than he deserves.

Shiro wonders, wrapped in the warmth of another person, what Matt would've thought of him being here. Hero of the garrison, champion of the arena, escaped prisoner, black paladin of Voltron-survivor of the Keroberos mission.

Countless stars flash by as the castle drifts through space, innumerable worlds passing by as they move through the universe-maybe one of them containing Matt.

One day, maybe, he would get the chance to ask him.

Shiro was alive.

 

 

 


End file.
